Elissa Kalver

I think it's the passion behind it, and how I'm living what I truly believe needs to exist, while experiencing it in real time. A lot of how I've run this as a quote-unquote business or nonprofit versus other businesses in my career before cancer is similar in some ways, and super different in others. There are certain rules of entrepreneurship that I throw out the window a little bit, because there's just some things that are not like anything else, since I am in it and seeing it so firsthand. I think that this being done by someone living with cancer in real time is the differentiator, and the part that makes people feel connected.

I think a lot of it is that we're constantly put in positions, particularly as women, where we have to balance so many realities at the same time. You know, not just in the cancer world, which, of course, I have to balance the fact that I can live my life and do a lot of things, but I'm also terminally ill. But as a woman, we also balance being a mom, or having careers, and pain that we think is normal until other people speak up, and we realize, oh, no, we should be treated for that. So I think the biggest thing as that relates to personal life and business is that I think that we know where our bar is, and we know our limitations, and we shouldn't let other people's perceptions impose on that idea that we see for ourselves. Because if I did that, I would have just focused on my own cancer treatment and done what everyone told me to do, which was just take care of myself and worry about my own treatment, and I would be, you know, maybe alive still, but I'd be dead inside if that was what I did.

I always try to meet myself where I'm at, and it's not that it's easy, but that's how I look at myself and how I look at others. What might work for me right now is different from what worked for me 3 or 4 years ago, or even a few months ago. I've been on 6 different lines of cancer treatment, I've had 3 different recurrences, and I've had treatments that the side effects outweighed the benefit, and I voluntarily advocated to go off of it. We're not all the same, but we all can help pave the way together, and so that's really how I look at it - knowing that there's no one right answer for all of us, and there's not even one right answer for us as individuals. It's definitely about adapting to what we need.